When Paul Bunyan Was a Baby (Campfire Story)

Everybody knows Paul Bunyan was the biggest logger who ever lived. But did you know he was a pretty big baby, too?

The night Paul was born, way up in the state of Maine, the WIND was blowing off the ocean, and the whole town was waiting to see the new baby. Usually one stork brings a baby. One stork tried to bring Paul. It flapped and flapped and didn't get off the ground. So they called in a second stork, and a third, and a fourth. In the end it took five STORKS to carry him, all flapping as hard as they could, and when they set him down on his parents' doorstep, the porch cracked in half.

And then BABY PAUL woke up.

His first cry shook the windows out of every house on the street. The cows in the next county stopped giving milk for a week. The church bell started ringing all by itself. His mother picked him up, which took both arms, a wheelbarrow and the neighbor's mule, and said, 'Now, now. What does my little boy need?'

What he needed was breakfast. BABY PAUL drank the milk of twenty cows every morning, and for a snack he ate forty bowls of porridge, the bowls included. Every day he grew another foot. By the time he was three weeks old, he'd outgrown his crib, his room and the house. His father had to cut the roof off so the poor kid could sit up.

Worse, he was a wiggly sleeper. One night BABY PAUL rolled over in his sleep and knocked down four miles of forest. The next night he kicked his blanket off and it landed in New Hampshire. The neighbors held a town meeting. 'That baby needs a cradle,' they said. 'And he needs it somewhere he can't knock anything over.'

So the townsfolk cut the tallest pine trees in Maine and built the biggest cradle the world had ever seen. It was more like a ship than a cradle. They floated it out into the Bay of Fundy, tucked BABY PAUL in, and gave it a push. The WAVES rocked the cradle, gently, gently, and Paul fell fast asleep.

For a while it worked. Then Paul started rocking the cradle himself. Back and forth. Back and forth. Every time the cradle tipped one way, it pushed up WAVES seventy-five feet tall. Every time it tipped back, the water rushed away and left the fishing boats sitting on the mud. The WAVES sloshed up the beaches and back again, up and back, all day and all night.

The fishermen didn't know what to do. The ship captains didn't know what to do. Finally the Navy sent three warships to sail out and rock the cradle the other way. They fired their cannons for seven hours straight before BABY PAUL finally woke up, yawned, and climbed out onto the shore, where his mother was waiting with his morning milk.

His parents decided Maine was a little too small for a boy like Paul, so they moved the family to the big north woods, where there was room to grow. And grow he did. But that's another story.

Here's the funny part. Even after Paul climbed out of that cradle, the water in the Bay of Fundy never quite settled down. To this day it still sloshes up and back, twice a day, with the highest tides anywhere on Earth. Scientists will tell you it's because of the shape of the bay and the pull of the moon.

But the folks in Maine know better. That's just the WAVES still rocking from when Paul Bunyan was a baby.

Storyteller tips: the Bay of Fundy, between Maine and Nova Scotia, really does have the highest tides in the world, up to about fifty feet. Let the WAVES group sway bigger each time the cradle rocks.

Ask the Scouts how many storks it would take to carry them. Then ask how many it would take to carry their Scoutmaster.